opinion Every day globalisation provides stark reminders that economic efficiency is often accompanied by unconscionable brutality.

Indeed, the business investments in poor countries that make possible higher quality goods at ever lower cost invariably bring with them a long train of well-documented abuses: child labor, poisoned environments, long and punishing work days, starvation wages, discrimination, sexual predation, and the suppression of freedom of expression and association.

These conditions - sometimes recalling outright slavery and provoking moral outrage whenever they come to light - underscore the need to improve, and effectively enforce, regulation of global labor markets. The crucial question is not whether to protect vulnerable workers, but how.

One response is to monitor and enforce uniform rules such as the 'core' global labor standards recently adopted by the International Labor Organization (ILO). But can fixed regulations really keep pace with the never-ending changes in production within companies and across supply chains?

Can one-size-fits-all rules really address labor conditions across the developing world and its often informal economies? For even in advanced countries, where bureaucracies work well, labor rules are being relaxed in favor of greater flexibility while the spread of work from home, and other forms of 'sweated' labor, frustrates existing regulations.

Worse still, in countries where development is the central problem, uniform standards may have perverse effects. Banning child labor, for instance, may succeed in forcing children out of factories only to drive them deeper into poverty or into the sex industry.

More broadly, fixed rules not only smack of trade protectionism, they are likely to make abuses harder to detect by encouraging businesses to go underground.

Ethical consumerism

One alternative to conventional regulation is to mobilise public pressure on multinational companies to adopt voluntary codes of conduct for their global operations.

The incentives are clear - around three-quarters of respondents in recent US opinion polls say that they would avoid retailers who sell garments made in sweatshops, and more than 80 percent would pay higher prices for clothes if they could be certain that the clothing was manufactured under decent conditions. Much of this holds true for European consumers.

Five recently established organizations - SA8000, the Workers' Rights Consortium, and the Fair Labor Association in the US, the UK's Ethical Trading Initiative, and Europe's Clean Clothes Campaign - cater to this trend in ethical consumerism.

These bodies design model codes of conduct - often based on the ILO's core standards - and advance third-party monitoring, employing accounting and consulting firms, local non-governmental organisations, and trade unions, to verify compliance.

Of course, this approach has limits. While voluntary codes generate de facto standards with which to criticise firms that maintain odious labor practices, public pressure may move only the most conscientious or publicly exposed firms to act responsibly.

Moreover, their open character leaves such codes vulnerable to becoming mere public relations tools. An unscrupulous company, or one indifferent to its subcontractors' labor practices, need only adopt - or affiliate with a standard-setting body that adopts - a code emphasising vague intentions to improve performance, and then retain pliant monitors to testify that its motives are sincere.

Full disclosure

How, then, can the promise of core labour standards be fulfilled without risking the unintended consequences of fixed regulations and the limits of voluntarism?

We propose a strategy that deploys public power in a new way: to use 'good' private actors -those who successfully improve labour and other social conditions - to discipline 'bad' producers. Unlike conventional regulation and voluntary codes, this strategy does not begin with standards, but with a demand for full public disclosure.

Firms would be required to reveal their workplace conditions, wage levels, workforce profiles, labour management systems, and similar elements of social performance within their global operations. Monitors, in turn, would rank the performance of firms and report these rankings - along with the inspection and verification protocols used - to a governing council.

Investor, consumer, and political pressures in this transparent environment would stimulate mutually reinforcing competition among firms in the formal economy and third-party monitors.

Firms who believe that their labour practices are outstanding would seek out credible monitors to verify their accomplishments, while rigorous monitors would seek outstanding performers in order to hone their skills, build their reputations, and expand their influence.

A system like this will emerge from neither the conventional core standards approach nor the recent surge of voluntary activity around corporate codes of conduct. Instead, it depends upon the deliberate and forceful construction of framework institutions to establish a level playing field for social competition.

Ideally, the governing council of this framework should be composed of international organisations, such as the UN, ILO, and the World Bank, that can create a central body of research on the social performance of international business, ensure that monitoring data is comparable, and coordinate public dissemination of this information.

Suppliers compelled

By creating a framework that opens both firms and monitors to public scrutiny, standards would emerge by comparing the best practices in similarly situated facilities. A factory in Vietnam might be compared to one in Indonesia, but not to one in, say, Europe. The demanding standards that would emerge from this would not be protectionist but yet be feasible.

Over time, these standards could be steadily improved, as firms that depend on consumer loyalty and seek to outperform their peers would compel suppliers and the suppliers of suppliers (many of whom may be in the informal economy), to follow suit.

Meanwhile, by identifying the worst local performers, this framework will bolster enforcement by national regulatory agencies. More ambitiously, these agencies might use the emerging standards to transform their own fixed-rule systems.

ARCHON FUNG and DARA O'ROURKE are professors of politics at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology respectively while CHARLES SABEL is professor of law at the Columbia University.